Communication systems generally use light emitting diode (LED) display devices to provide a user with information about the internal state of the system. Currently, there is no standard way to reflect system state information. Each system vendor displays system state information of their respective devices according to their own protocol. Thus, the same system state information is often displayed in several different ways across the device families of the various vendors.
LED display devices are the generally used to provide state information of the underlying system. The LED display device includes a processor, or other computation device, which is configured to receive signals from the underlying system, which represents the status of the various components (i.e. ports) of the system. In response to these signals, the processor directs an associated driver mechanism to display visual information, according to the particular system protocol, corresponding to the received signals. Based on the signals provided by the processor, the LED's convey information about the state of the underlying system by, for example, being turned on, turned off or blinking.
A drawback associated with conventional display systems is that they can only handle predefined operations. They cannot be modified to display information that they were not designed to display, or display information from another vendor. In order to obtain the state of systems from a variety of vendors, a controller is needed from each vendor. Thus, there is a need for a universal LED display device that can be used to provide system state information for a variety of controllers from different vendors.